


even oaks must bend

by winteryknights (BlackcatNamedlucky)



Series: the grave and the garden [3]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Confrontations, Discussions of Forgiveness, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, POV Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Post-Movie: The Old Guard (2020), Universe Alteration, brief depiction of panic attacks, brief non-graphic mentions of gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:20:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26273992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackcatNamedlucky/pseuds/winteryknights
Summary: The sidestreets are dead silent compared to the bustle of downtown, letting both ease and worry simmer in Joe’s bones as they pass only occasional pedestrians on their walk to the address Copley had given them. It’s a small apartment, part of a stonework building that’s likely just as old as Booker himself and a part of Joe wonders if he’d chosen it for the familiarity. A bigger part of him finds that it still hurts to care.Or,Andy doesn't have ninety years, but she does have a plan.
Relationships: Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Nicky | Nicolo di Genova, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: the grave and the garden [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1852273
Comments: 8
Kudos: 74





	even oaks must bend

**Author's Note:**

> This could be read as a standalone but might make more sense if you read the first work in the series.

Joe has to leave the safehouse. He can’t deal with the look on Andy’s face, the desperation in her eyes that mirrors that of a wild animal about to be dealt a death blow.

The idea is stifling, forces his breath from his lungs in quick, shallow beats that come ragged from his throat, out of sync with the erratic rhythm of his heart in a way that makes him feel dizzy, unbalanced. It flits through his mind that he, too, feels like a wild animal, that Andy’s request is a rock hurled at him with the force of a great beast and all he can do is watch.

Because how could he say no? How could he tell a woman who’s friendship had lasted nearly a millennium, a woman who was the most vulnerable she had ever been, a woman who was hiding all her despair in her eyes and showing none of it on her face, that he would not help her keep a promise she had feared would be broken forever?

The problem is that the price of saying yes weighs heavy on his heart and he’s not sure how easily he can pay it. Not when it was the betrayal of the one he’d be paying it to that had caused him the worst wounds of his centuries on this earth.

He has seen his own flesh rended so many times, stood up and seen pieces of himself strewn on the ground and known himself still to be whole, taken so much injury and kept going, and maybe, in the beginning, it had been hard to forget these moments but as time carried ever onward it became...ordinary.

But these wounds—

He may no longer feel them, and there is no mark on his skin as proof they happened, but he remembers the pain.

More than that, he remembers the terror, that it was ice cold, how it spread through him with each new level of depravity their captors had reached until it was entrenched in his bones. He wasn’t sure he would ever be able to rip it out.

He thinks that these wounds might just be the ones that do him in, despite the years that have passed since they’d been inflicted.

He can hear Nicky calling for him over the cacophony of his thoughts and stops in his tracks, the gravel garden path of this safehouse shifting under him, and he notices that the air is sharp and cold. It bites his lungs with each breath, desperate things that come in staccato waves and sting the back of his throat. He feels his chest tighten more with each inhale, though whether it’s from the cold or the panic he can’t tell.

He feels a hand on his shoulder and leans into the touch, though his mind still races and heart still pounds, he feels his muscles uncoil, the tension fading as Nicky loops his arms around his waist, careful to slip them under Joe’s where they hang at his sides and rests his head on his shoulder.

« _Breathe, love_ ,» he whispers. The Arabic falls from his tongue like leaves in an autumn wind, gentle and susurrus, and Joe sinks into him. He lets his shoulders go loose, tries to match the rise and fall of Nicky’s chest with shuddering breaths until his head no longer swims and his pulse steadies. Something they’ve had to learn how to do for one another, over the years, since the first night of sleep that had been shattered by screaming after a dream contorted into a memory.

He’d love to say it’s gotten easier with time. Remembering.

They’re not sure how long they let the silence sit in the air, a placid kind of silence, muted by the surrounding forest and the mist that rolls off the nearby lake, but it’s comfortable. A necessary quiet, one that allows the men to think, to compose themselves and their thoughts before having to step back out into the world.

« _I don’t know how to face him_ ,» Joe admits, voice quiet, thick. « _I don’t think I will ever be able to forgive him for—_ » he swallows through the tightness in his throat and blinks the glassiness from his eyes, but he can’t bring himself to finish the thought.

He doesn’t need to.

« _Yusuf_ ,» Nicky says, and his voice sounds so full of pain, and worry, and love that Joe is afraid he’s about to shatter, « _I know, love_ ,» his voice goes rough and he buries his face in Joe’s neck where it slopes into his shoulder. « _I know. Some things are not so easily forgotten_.» He takes a breath, brings a hand up so that it sits over Joe’s heart, and Joe finds himself instinctually bringing his own hand to Nicky’s, lacing their fingers together. « _So we do not bring forgiveness, we don’t call it that. But we do this anyways. We do this for Quynh because we couldn’t before_.» 

“Work with someone we don’t want to eat with?” Joe asks with a small smile, the favorite proverb of Andy’s tripping from his tongue in reluctant English, and Nicky lets out a laugh.

“Yes, work with someone we don’t want to eat with.”

They fall quiet again, only for a moment, before Joe takes a breath and settles back into the language of his far-gone youth. « _Maybe one day we’ll want to eat with him again_.»

Nicky stills behind him. « _I hope so_.»

~*~

When they tell Andy they’ll do it, she looks like the weight of the world has lifted from her shoulders.

~*~

They land at Charles de Gaulle and Joe’s skin prickles, too close to the old safehouse for any measure of comfort. He glances at Nicky and sees the same anxiety written on his face, the shadow cast by his hood seeming to darken the expression so it reads like a thundercloud about to crack. He reaches over, wraps an arm around Nicky’s shoulders, and pulls him close, the line of contact between their torsos the only part of him that buzzes with something other than apprehension. Nicky looks at him, a small, tight smile adorning his face for a split second before it falls flat, and Joe’s heart aches.

« _We’re safe, my heart_ ,» he whispers, and Nicky’s shoulders drop. The movement is small enough that it would be imperceptible to anyone who hadn’t memorized the lines of his body in a way intent upon worship, the way a priest memorizes scripture, but to Joe, it sings of relief.

When he looks to the women again, the sympathy and worry on Nile’s face is so raw and open that it hurts, and he has to cut his eyes away to not break where he stands.

~*~

The sidestreets are dead silent compared to the bustle of downtown, letting both ease and worry simmer in Joe’s bones as they pass only occasional pedestrians on their walk to the address Copley had given them. It’s a small apartment, part of a stonework building that’s likely just as old as Booker himself and a part of Joe wonders if he’d chosen it for the familiarity. A bigger part of him finds that it still hurts to care.

Nile steps forward and knocks on the door with a steady hand and Joe feels himself tense, as if he were heading into battle rather than seeing an old friend.

Maybe he is, though. Whatever lies ahead won’t be pretty, and it certainly won’t be painless, but it has to be done. The way it’s been for every battle he’s fought.

It’s not a thought he has much time to mull over before Booker opens the door, looking run-down but not worse for wear as Joe had suspected he might. His eyes land on Nile first and fear shoots through them.

“She’s not—” he begins to ask, the tremor in his voice another thing Joe wishes he could just not care about. He guesses he should be grateful it doesn’t take long for Booker to see Andy and sigh away the tension in his shoulders.

“You’re not rid of me yet, Book,” she says, voice soft but tight, and steps around Nile to pull him in for a hug. Joe has to look away to keep the pain that’s fisted around his heart from tightening. After a moment, Andy steps back, one hand still on Booker’s shoulder. He looks at the group, gaze lingering too long on the crumbling brick of the wall behind Joe and Nicky.

“Just Nile I might understand,” he starts, cutting his eyes to the youngest immortal, “but why are you all here? Ninety years premature, not even a heads up from Copely, what is it you’re trusting me with and not him?” he asks, the question infused with a wry laugh.

“Well, I don’t have ninety years.” Andy says, matter-of-fact, “And let’s be clear, I’m still pissed at you, but what I do have is a promise to keep and a lead on Quynh. And you have penance to pay so you’re going to help us follow it.”

Booker stares at Andy for a second, then steps back from the doorway and motions the group in.

He doesn’t make eye contact, as they enter. Joe can’t tell if he wishes he would.

~*~

They’re spread around what little space is available in Booker’s cramped apartment, every surface not occupied by a body is holding atlases from the past 5 centuries, seafloor maps as old as they could find, and any old mariner’s record Andy had figured might help them in their quest. Andy holds onto the copies of the diary pages she’d gotten from the museum under the guise that she was a history professor working on a research project with her students.

(It wasn’t technically a lie, she’d protested. She had been a history professor, nevermind that it was for 6 weeks, 150 years ago, and she’d been going by Andrew to do it.)

There’s a boat sitting at a marina an hour away, full of sonar equipment (mostly stolen) and diving gear (mostly not), waiting for them to make sense of it all.

It feels as though the tension in the room is muting any sound.

“Right,” Andy says, finally, slapping her hands on her thighs and standing. “Well, Nile and I are going to get food—”

“We are?”

“—Booker, where’s the nearest grocer?”

“Straight shot north, once you reach the main road,” he responds, as if on auto-pilot, and Andy takes Nile’s hand and pulls her up from her seat, tugging her towards the door.

What remains is the sounds of a pen scratching paper just a little too hard, pages being turned with unnecessary force, sounds that grate the ears and rake the mind.

It’s Nicky who breaks first, or maybe this is his version of offering a truce, setting his pen down to mark his place in the book he’s consulting before looking up. “We loved you as a brother, Sebastien,” he says, with a cold sort of softness, and the immediacy with which guilt floods Booker’s expression is like an arrow to the heart. It doesn’t stop Nicky, whose hands shake where he’s clasped them in his lap, though his voice remains steady. “No, actually, we still do. And that’s the knife in the wound, isn’t it? Because somewhere along the way, you stopped. You stopped seeing us as family and started seeing us as a means to an end, and all we ever saw you as was—” he cuts himself off with a scoff and looks away.

Joe stands silently from his chair across the room and walks to him, stopping behind him and laying a gentle hand on his shoulder. 

Booker’s eyes tighten and he swallows hard, looks down at his hands, tracing an invisible line on a map. “I never—” he takes a deep breath, lets it out shakily. “I never thought anyone would get hurt. I never meant for that. I don’t know why I thought it would be any different than what it was.”

“But why?” Joe hears himself ask. “Why do it in the first place?”

Booker shrugs, raises his head like it pains him to do so, and looks between Joe and Nicky. “Because for the better part of two hundred years I felt alone?”

And, oh. There’s that old anger.

Joe feels a hand on his and realizes how tightly he’d been gripping Nicky’s shoulder. He eases, flexes his fingers under Nicky’s by way of apology and takes the answering stroke of a thumb over his knuckles as reply, and lets out a sharp breath. “Well, you were wrong. You weren’t alone. You _chose_ to be. We were _always_ there for you.” 

“I know, and I know ‘I’m sorry’ isn’t enough, I know there’s nothing I could say, there’s probably nothing I could do that would ever earn your forgiveness, and I don’t blame you, but I am sorry. I’ve been sorry since I first set up that fucking meeting, I was just too caught up in my own grief to back down. I should’ve just given myself over at the start.”

Joe sighs. What he wants to say is that he should have talked to them from the start. From before Copley even entered the picture. The first time he’d _had_ the hare-brained idea. But he knows that won’t help anyone now, so what comes out instead is, “Just, help Andy with this. It’s as good a first step as any.”

Joe holds Booker’s gaze just a beat longer before the other man clears his throat and looks back down at the map in front of him, but Joe can tell he’s not really studying it anymore. He feels Nicky’s shoulders sag more than he hears the heavy breath he’s let out, feels the hand on his slip away, watches it fall to Nicky’s lap the moment his head drops. 

The silence is broken by a loud knock on the door and a man’s call, muffled by the heavy wood. « _Jean-Paul! Es-tu en ici?_ »

« _Ouais! J’arrive!_ », Booker calls, and stands, turning to look at Joe and Nicky again, frozen in their solemnity. “For what it’s worth,” he says, “I did see you as family. I still do. I just didn’t know how to reconcile that with what family has meant for me.” He pauses a moment, then gives a small nod and walks to the door.

~*~

The sun beats relentlessly on the deck of the rented boat, at its nth stop in the middle of the ocean, little cobalt waves lapping at its hull almost mockingly. Or maybe it just feels that way, with heavy, drowsy sun-sickness set in countless hours ago and nothing to do but wait. It reminds Joe of when he was a young man (well, young _er_ ), becalmed on the ocean voyage that had led him to Andy and Quynh for the first time. He’s pretty sure he’d knitted enough socks to ensure all the armies of the world would have warm feet.

He idly wonders if he should have brought some needles and yarn, remembers that Nile had been curious to learn, when the surface of the water breaks again.

This time, Sebastien’s not alone.

The relief that blossoms in Joe’s chest threatens to choke him with tangled vines that reach up into his throat and encircle his heart. At its root, a bud of forgiveness, beginning to twist into bloom.

Maybe, he thinks, between pulling Quynh onto the deck and helping her into Andy’s arms, you can’t go right to wanting to eat with someone.

He leans over the gunwale again, extends a hand to Sebastien, still treading water. Maybe, first, you have to tolerate the walk to the grocery store.

**Author's Note:**

> translations: (thanks to my dear dear friend Cameron aka braadvengolor)  
> Es-tu en ici?- Are you in here?  
> Ouais! J'arrive!- Yeah! I'm coming!
> 
> one more work and this series will be done! sorry this one took so long to get out, the material was a bit more complicated to work with and I've been dealing with moving into college and starting classes so I didn't have a whole lot of time to work on this. thank you for reading! if you enjoyed and it strikes your fancy, leaving a comment/kudos always makes my day :)  
> I did only a basic skim of the wikipedia page for knowledge about sonar because the ocean scares me (pretty sure I did more research about the history of knitting for this, actually,)  
> if you want to chat about this fic/series/the old guard you can find me on tumblr at [the-sneering-menagerie](https://the-sneering-menagerie.tumblr.com) or you can find my writing blog where I take requests at [redking-scripting](https://redking-scripting.tumblr.com).


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